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from dust to the beyond
Topic Started: May 22 2011, 06:35 PM (234 Views)
Primal
Unregistered

Place in Timeline: May 20th




Snapping a neck isn’t difficult-- apply enough pressure and it’ll pop pretty easy. Instant death is optional.

Primal had learned that pleasant little detail the first time he’d opted to break the neck of some unfortunate fucker who’d gotten in his way out in the field. They’d been left paralysed and gasping, asphyxiating slow over several long minutes. With practice he’d perfected the proper twist and wrench technique, learned how to sever the spinal cord with one hard tug, sending the body into sudden spinal shock, shutting down the nervous system fast and easy and painless. But despite having become desensitised by the distance he’d put between himself and the reality of being an Acolyte, when she folded, fell limp against him, her last breath compressed against the collapsed walls of her throat; for the first time in fifteen years, Raen cried.

An hour later Primal was sat silent in her cell still holding her body and he absolutely could not find a single shred of emotion, not despair or anger or loss, not indifference or apathy or self-loathing, nothing recognisable on a massive scale of feelings once familiar. He hadn’t the will to seek a name for the slick wet space that had opened up inside him, only vaguely aware that it reminded him of something nasty he couldn’t remember. He imagined it was somehow important and that he should be concerned about his dulled reactions, only able to examine the situation with clinical incuriosity.

Jesse was dead. He’d murdered her.

Okay.

Briefly his ribcage seemed too small for his lungs. The thoracic implosion was fleeting.

He was no more than a braindead soldier following the orders of a cold-blooded cunt who held humanity in such great contempt he squeezed out the warmth and the compassion and the empathy and everything that made up the soft parts of the soul until finally it became this bitter, sociopathic thing. Fuck humanity and its inferiority and its prehistoric emotions.

Primal, head against the wall and eyes turned to the ceiling to blankly watch the featureless blue, remembered that first day as an Acolyte, his aggressive, cocky bullshit and his overblown ambition and his childish demands. Magneto had done nothing but adhere to the request he’d made that day. He was a weapon, an attack dog, a fucking mongrel, and he was nothing without the influence of his commander, and this was an irrefutable reminder of his place in the terrorist’s grand scheme. He had never been autonomous.

Christ, when had he become such a lapdog? Few years back he’d been red raw and indignant and spitting and alive, hostile and rebellious, and now he was chiselled and obedient and he was holding the body of the woman he loved and trying to make sense of it and trying to find some kind of human response to the way she lay slack in his arms. Her death replayed incessant in his mind, the aftershock of her vertebrae giving way still echoing through his forearms despite metal and scales. Primal tightened a fist until his whole arm shook, but his bones didn’t quit ringing.

The Milano-Firths were extinct. On one of the nights they hadn’t spent fighting or fucking Jesse had told him how her parents had been taken out in unrelated instances of gangland violence. When she’d watched her brother die during the Apocalypse mess she’d come back doubled-over and crippled by her loss and he’d been ineffective and clumsy in his attempts to help her wade through that grief. He’d abetted her misery, compounded it through what amounted to abuse and repaid her undeserved kindness by killing her.

She had that early death smell. Primal flicked his gaze down to stare at the muddy outline of her unresponsive features, not totally cold but cooling so instead of muddled heat he could see her face in cutting detail. Magneto would have her incinerated. He couldn’t… God… He couldn’t let them toss her body into a furnace like so much wasted meat, like she was the disused carcass of some slaughterhouse pig.

He stood with her, calves seizing into cramps he barely registered, and left the chamber stilted and shattered and piecing his resolve together only long enough to direct himself towards the teleportation rooms.
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Spitfire
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Superspeed with Pyrotechnic Effects
Joint Post with Primal and Spitfire

The speedster closed her eyes as the waves of energy surrounded her, gently pulling her into a vortex that opened up into one of the large teleportation bays of Sanctuary. It had been a relatively simple mission, but she had some cuts and bruises, the usual war wounds she bore home. Nothing that a quick trip to the Infirmary and a bath wouldn’t make right again…maybe some ice cream too. Jac also told herself how good it would be to see Tommy, just because. Feeling the change beneath her feet, Spitfire opened her blue eyes and stepped off the large disc in the chamber, tipping a salute to the man who had brought her home safe.

Making a small turn, the blonde headed towards the door, when something made her stop dead in her tracks, jaw dropping and blue eyes growing wide, not able to properly take in what she was seeing…no, no…no it couldn’t be. Primal came in, looking dazed and utterly confused, like he’d been…the thought slipped from her mind as Jac really realised what she was looking at; Jesse, dangling limp and lifeless in the grasp of the saurian mutant.

“Everybody out…Everybody OUT!” she was dimly aware of her voice rising up out of her chest, sounding weird and shrill as it rang around the chamber, her youth still making her cautious of the authority she was graced with. Thankfully the place was relatively empty and those who were there did not seem to mind vacating.

When everyone had gone, Jac took a step towards her friend, confused and scared by what she was seeing, by what she was thinking. “Primal…?”


He wasn’t sure how he’d travelled the length of Sanctuary, the journey from the cells to the teleportation rooms an ugly blur of instinct and irresolution and disconnected imagery, Jesse’s corpse pulling on his shoulders more than it should. She felt like a limp bedsheet in his arms, light and slack and cold and yet he slumped into the weight as if she was made out of stone.

Primal didn’t immediately recognise Jac, her scent hidden by the rising stink of posthumous enzymes assaulting his feral-sharp nostrils, blotting out the swill of adrenaline and sweat she’d carried over from whatever mission she’d been given. Some kind of wail came out of her and he stared at the speedster with antiseptic suspicion, sizing up the little Acolyte before realising she’d snapped off a few desperate orders. There was nothing warm in the way he looked at her. He might have been analysing a target.

“What?”


Shifting uneasily, Jac almost snapped ‘what the fuck do you mean, what?’ but she stopped herself in time, looking away for a split second so that her head blurred, a white blonde halo around it.

“Primal. What have you done? Put her down. We need to fix this…” her eyes kept slipping to Jesse in the vain hope that she might see the woman’s chest rising, or hand twitch. But the way her head lolled, limp and floppy, she knew there was little hope.


What had he done? Primal’s resolve flickered, that chest-twinge momentarily buckling his lungs again. His lip curled in what might have been scorn, fingers flexing around Jesse’s dead limbs. Behind Jac the portals wavered, their energies rolling lower in response to their absent attendants. Air squeaked against his teeth as he sucked on them, mind working too fast but responding sluggish, still reeling and still conflicted and still not really capable of coherent thought.

“How the fuck do you propose I fix this?” He choked a grating laugh. “How the fuck, Jackie; how the fuck do I fix this? Jesus shitting Christ, are you fucking retarded?”


“Maybe,” she shrugged, numb. “Maybe that’s why I’ve survived this long but even if I am, I know that you can’t just walk around with a dead body,” her voice caught in her throat and the girl nearly choked on her own words. The conversation sounded as if it was underwater, or in another room. It was so surreal, it was almost hard to imagine it was actually going on, right now and she was part of it.

“Where do you think you’re going?” she stated, skimming away from the subject of fixing slightly and taking a small side step so she was more in front of the portal. If he was getting ready to bolt…Oh god. No, no. No that could not happen, not again.


A dead body. Jesse’s dead body. Jesse was dead.

“I killed her.”

It sounded unrealistic, as though he was referring to something he’d done in a dream or while playing a video game or as if he was talking about euthanizing a sickly family pet. A frown bent his eyebrows, breaking the emotionless sheet, and for a second he wondered if there was an earthquake, but he was just holding her too tight, crushing her against him.

“Move.”


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Primal
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JP Continued

Slowly, Jac shook her head, keeping her head up despite the fact she was holding back wave upon wave of nervous trembling. Oh, god, this was all so messed up…Had…he? The fact he was holding Jesse, dead, the notion that he might actually have killed her connected, really connected, despite her earlier questions.

“You know I can’t,” she said simply. “Put her down before this goes too far. Please.”


“This went too far the moment I got my fucking arm blown off. Y’know how that happened, chick? This stupid cunt helped the Cajun dick get free. Yeah. ‘Cause of her I got a nice shiny new chunk of metal for an arm. Then I gotta keep my trap shut for fucking months freaking out ‘cause I’m shit scared that someone’s gonna find out about what she did and hell, the big guy finds out anyway and orders me to deal with it, and what the fuck am I supposed to do? What the fucking fuck am I supposed to do, Jac?” A pained snarl ripped its way up through his chest, cutting him off mid-sentence, her name mangled into noise.

“Fucking… yeah, I got a whole city of happy cunts under my ass and a girl who ain’t got a scrap of sense in her head and I gotta make a choice, Jac. I gotta make a choice. So I have her arrested, yeah? Only then I gotta let her be dogfood for the fuckers who like to turn our prisoners into mincemeat and do it all over again day after day after fucking day… you know the type, Jac, you fucking know the goddamn type, the ones who stink like shit and blood and puke and enjoy it like it’s a damn cologne. Then what? How long do I let that go on? How fucking long? I can’t… I can’t kill and I can’t let her go and I can’t let it fucking go on so what do I fucking do, Jac? Don’t tell me when this shit goes too damn far.”

He was spitting his words. Primal tongued away flecks of saliva.

“I’m gone. I am fucking gone.”


When she had found out about Remy, it was like someone had shut all the windows and curtains on her, leaving her in darkness. Despite the horror of the Brotherhood, the blood and the pain and everything that rightly made them detestable to some, she managed to find some solace in the midst of it all. Then when what had happened with Pietro occurred, then the resulting escape with Remy and that SHIELD agent in tow, it was like someone had ripped the carpet from underneath her, leaving her in the dark, disorientated. Jac was beginning to forget the difference between right and wrong.

“Where will you even go? The surface? Where?” she asked, voice becoming incredulous. “You’re about to cross a line and you won’t ever come back over. Don’t you think you’ve crossed enough of those today?” she asked, his words about what had happened biting at her, tearing away. There was going to be no good end to this…


“I’m gone,” he repeated, the unemotional wall sliding back into place unbidden. He was at the mercy of this rollercoaster. Mostly he felt nothing, interspersed with horrible, empty fury. Jesse wasn’t the only person who had died today.

“I gotta do something. I gotta do this.”


“I can’t let you go, you know that,” Jac clenched her fists, taking a breath, her dirty jacket rising and falling with her shoulders and chest. Her face did not read the same as her stance however and anyway, the girl knew that she couldn’t physically fight the older Acolyte. He would have to physically come through her, should he want to leave. She couldn’t….


“You gonna fight me, Jackie?”

Primal levelled his gaze on her, the hot-hot blaze of her speedster’s metabolism a nervous plume against the machinery. He examined how he felt about killing the Acolyte and couldn’t translate the response. It was unpleasant. He took a step forward and tilted his head, a thrill of scales solidifying across his skin, remembering parkour and cops and her making him laugh and pizza nights and poker and getting piss-drunk and cracking up and seeing in her a little sister, and none of it mattered.

“Don’t be stupid.”


Spitfire’s bottom lip started to tremble as he asked his question. Soon, nearly everyone would be gone who had made her life bearable in the Brotherhood. Nearly all of them ‘traitors’. What did that make her? How did that look to everyone here who she tried to prove herself to day in, day out? She couldn’t care less about them so much, but with Tommy…

“You know I can’t just step aside…If I did…” Jac swallowed, trying not to look at Primal anymore, trying not to look at Jesse, limp in his arms. There was a moment of dead silence, followed by her sniffing quietly, trying to chase away the tears that were threatening. If she let him go and she was found out, she’d be worse than dead. It wasn’t herself she was scared for though, not by half.


There was nothing left to say. Primal stalked towards her and stopped, staring down impassive at the pintsized Spitfire, her head level with Jesse’s lolling body, Jesse’s limbs starting to stiffen in his grasp. This close he could smell the welling saline. His jaw tightened, body tensing, his mangled emotional state causing him to telegraph before he twisted into a hard tail-whip. He didn’t expect it to hit; even straight she was fast enough to dodge, and he held nothing back, because he had nothing left to restrain.


As he approached, her heart thumped painfully away in her chest and she clenched her hands into fists to try and stop them from trembling. Primal seemed to walk in slow motion to her and there was plenty of time to move, but she stayed still, on her spot before the portal. For a moment he just stood there, Jesse still cradled like a doll in his arms, her head on the same level as Spitfire’s own. Jac tried not to look.

Seeing the tail come around, the speedster’s natural instinct was to quickly dart out of the way, evading any harm at all to her, but something inside her pulled her feet the opposite way, right into the path of Primal’s lashing tail. It hit dead on target. Before she dropped to the ground, the speedster flashed Primal one last look, something strange and pleading behind her blue eyes, before they defocused and slid shut.


She didn’t move. Primal followed through on the spin, rising and coming to a deft stop, feet spread apart, claws shrieking against the flooring. The impact was jarring, confusion piling on top of confusion, and he ground to a halt in time to watch her collapse in a shrivelled heap, useless and unconscious and twitching.

He couldn’t process this. He didn’t have the capacity to make sense of it. She was down, she was unconscious, she wasn’t dead; she hadn’t moved, and he didn’t know why, and it was all a big fucking mess and he was losing his mind. Everything was broken. After a few disjointed moments he simply stepped over her and up to the portal, punching in co-ordinates and mounting the complicated hardware.

Inside the swirling vortex he felt something intangible and damp and sticky like a wet finger bore a little hole in his mind, and as the portal engulfed him in fronds of furling energy he stiffened, eyes popping, falling hard into daylight…

(Continued in stranded)
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